HOW TO GET A LIFE IN ONE EASY LESSON

08 November 2006

Marty Neumeier

Marty Neumeier

We graphic designers are anti-time management. A steel door in
our brains slams shut at the very mention of the concept. This is
because graphic designers are pro-serendipity, pro-spontaneity,
pro-go-with-the- ow. Our ability to stay open to surprise and accident
is what determines our value as creative people. Except when it doesn't.

Pablo
Picasso, the very definition of a prolific artist, worked at a frenzied
pace. At least half of his success was due to the amount and the range
of his output. The problem was, it took a terrific toll on his personal
life and on the lives of the people around him. By all accounts,
Picasso ran on a mixture of adrenaline and emotion an explosive formula
that can fuel great art, but can also lead to highly destructive
behavior, as many of Picasso's lovers and acquaintances have attested.

While
some graphic designers have patterned their careers on the Picasso
model, most of us want more not just a satisfying career, but a
satisfying life. Adrenaline and emotion are not enough to arrive at
this more sophisticated goal. It also takes self-discipline. It takes
(stay with me here) time management. But before I tell you the
stunningly simple secret behind time management, I'd like you to
measure your assumptions against seven myths that can keep you from
embracing it.

Myth #1: If you don't sweat, you don't get.Stella
Adler of the Actors Studio often told her students, "If you want more,
pay more." While there is undeniable truth in this advice, results are
not always related to hard work. Keeping your shoulder to the wheel and
your nose to the grindstone will only assure you of two things: a bad
back and a at nose.

Myth #2: Activity is productivity.Many
people confuse keeping busy with achieving results. At the end of the
day, however, you can easily get the feeling that you haven't
accomplished anything. Two issues ago, on the cover of Critique #14,
James Victore pointed out that Thoreau's statement, "Simplify,
simplify," could have been simpler. But Thoreau had the right idea.
"It's not enough to be busy," he said. The question is: What are we
busy about?

Myth #3: Efficiency means effectiveness.Designers
are suspicious of efficiency, because we know that creativity often
takes the scenic route home. But efficiency is not the same as
effectiveness. Efficiency is aimed at doing the job right, while
effectiveness is aimed at doing the right job. Being effective in your
work - doing the right job - can double or triple your productivity.

Myth #4: A genius burns the midnight oil.As
design students, we learn to do whatever it takes, which usually means
staying up late to finish our projects. We then carry this habit into
the workplace, seeking the same rush of professional pride by working
evenings and weekends to finish what we couldn't finish during the
normal workday. Here we unwittingly cooperate with Parkinson's Law,
which states that work expands to fill the time available. Most
designers don't realize that if a task takes two hours, but could have
been done in one hour, the time savings would have multiplied the
studio's profits by as much as 600%.

Myth #5: If you want a thing done right, you have to do it yourself.This
applies to design managers who have built their reputations on their
own work. Yet the habit of micro-managing comes with two crippling
disadvantages: you rob your subordinates of responsibility and
therefore learning and you spread yourself too thin to be effective.
Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great
deal of yourself to nothing.

Myth #6: More discipline means less freedom.Discipline
has gotten a bad rap. We creative people have an aversion to being told
"no" - first by our parents, later in grammar school, and finally by
our bosses and clients. As a result, we also develop an aversion to
disciplining ourselves. But the truth is that self-discipline is the
key to high-level creative freedom.

Myth #7: We work best under pressure.This
belief is insidiously seductive because it encourages procrastination,
excuses shoddy work, and rewards us with a reputation for being a
"pressure player." Eventually we're found out, as we always suspected
we would be, and in the meantime our self-image has suffered from
coping with alternating bouts of laziness and fear. If you can
admit to falling prey to any or all of these myths, you re already on
the road to recovery. All you need now is a simple technique for
reversing your time-wasting habits. Are you ready? The secret of
effective time management is the "to-do" list. That's right, the to-do
list. And the magic behind the to-do list is the Pareto Principle.

The
Pareto Principle, sometimes called the 80/20 Rule, was invented by
19th-century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. Boiled down, the Pareto
Principle says that you can be 80% effective by achieving 20% of your
goals. If you complete only the one or two most important tasks on your
list each day, it states, you've still done most of what you needed to
do. Or at least you can sleep well, knowing that you've done the best
you can.

People have been surprised to hear that I not only
run a magazine but a design studio, in addition to designing, writing
articles, and going on the road for several weeks a year on speaking
tours and still find time to take vacations (though not as many as I'd
like). It's not due to some elaborate piece of time-management
software. It's not because I carry a beeper into the bathroom. And it's
not from working twelve-hour days. It's because of my to-do list, and
my willingness to submit to it.

A to-do list is not so much about keeping a record of tasks as it is about prioritizing those tasks.

But
while some people spend hours every week grouping and regrouping items
into tidy columns of high-priority, low-priority, and nice-to-do tasks,
you can skip all that and keep one simple list for everything. After
all, we're not mapping the human genome here. But there's a catch
to a to-do list you have to tackle the most important item on your
list. That's where the self-discipline comes in. You can t move one
thing to the top of your list, then decide to rebel against your own
authority and do something else, just because it s easier or more
amusing.

Of course, you can buy any number of
manufactured products that will lend structure and ritual to your
time-management efforts. There are personal planners, both paper and
digital; hand-held electronic organizers; and networked software
programs designed to facilitate collaboration. At last count there were
over 70 time-management software products on the market, all promising
to make you a more successful, more organized person. Without refuting
the claims of any of these products, I believe there's a distinct
danger that you'll spend more time with the product than you will with
your work. Much better to start small, develop a technique that works
for you, then streamline it later with an off-the-shelf system.

Rather
than suggest a one-size-fits-all technique, I'll simply explain how I
use my own system, and leave you to design a system for yourself.

I
keep two lists a general list on a yellow pad, and a specific list in
my calendar (Week at-a-Glance, $5.95). My general list has all the jobs
I need to complete in the near future including all the studio's work
in progress plus parts of jobs that are especially large. My calendar
list contains specific tasks for each day, such as meetings, phone
calls, and deadlines, along with a few items I hope to accomplish
sometime during the day. If I fail to get around to them, I move them
to the next day.

Every morning I check both lists. I'm
looking for two things: what's most important to do, and what's most
urgent to do. For example, it may be important to build a relationship
with a Critique contributor, but it may be urgent to apologize to a
client before he gets upset and fires the studio. Difficult as it
may be, I do the urgent thing first, because it'll lead to time-wasting
complications if I don't. I'm always eager to add new items to my list,
and I'm just as eager to finish them so I can cross them off. I
consider this the natural ebb and flow of business, like breathing or
the movement of the tides. Although I rarely complete every task on my
daily list, when I leave the studio I can usually forget about work
entirely, knowing that I did everything I reasonably could to keep
things moving.

That's it. You can read any number of
treatises on time management, but most, like this article, are cribbed
from a classic self-help book called Working Smart by Michael LeBoeuf.
While I could have adopted a more structured system, such as the one
LeBouef suggests in his book, I feel that a little less structure
allows for a little more of the serendipity, spontaneity, and flow I
need to feel creative.

Your own system, whether it contains
more or less structure, will probably deliver the same magical results
as mine, as long as it's based on the Pareto Principle. You'll find
that by becoming a willing slave to your to-do list, you'll become the
master of your working day. And then, whenever you need to get away,
you can simply add "take vacation" to the top of your list. Tunis,
anyone?

About Critique MagazineCritique is a beautifully designed quarterly magazine that makes sense
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